


Fashionably just designed to be rad

by Eloarei



Category: Pokemon GO
Genre: Crush at First Sight, Enemies to... something, F/M, Infatuation, Nonsense, One-Sided Attraction, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:48:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26866201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eloarei/pseuds/Eloarei
Summary: Sometimes you fall in love with people for no reason; and sometimes it's because, you know,that hair.
Relationships: Arlo/Female Pokemon GO Trainer(s), Arlo/Pokemon GO Trainer(s)
Comments: 14
Kudos: 26





	Fashionably just designed to be rad

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I like to write silly things. This is largely because I like to write, sometimes more than I like to be profound. ALSO, every time I look at Arlo, I get the good ol' doki-doki. That's why I had to waste today on this, haha =3  
> Also also, I was gonna get the title from Lady Gaga's "Hair", but instead I went with "Fashion of his love".

Back when she began her Pokemon journey, at the tender age of eleven, Elo had been sure her only goal was to become a Pokemon master. Of course, reality had sunk in when she realized she still had school to attend, and a variety of other responsibilities to tend to. But more than ten years later, she still devoted a fair amount of time to collecting and training her babies (because that’s really what they were: adorable pets, more than a means to the end of ‘becoming the best’).   
  
Things were calm, _normal,_ you might say, until that Team GO Rocket started rearing their perfectly-dyed heads. Elo’s first impression, when she first saw one of them loitering around a Pokestop, was not that they were ne’er-do-wells, but that they really had great stylists.   
  
Of course, that thought was pushed from her head when the punky pink-haired girl tried to steal Elo’s darling Snivy.   
  
“Hand over the Pokemon and nobody gets hurt,” she’d called, sneering as she stood up from her slouch against the ‘stop. She’d pulled a Pokeball off her belt with a click, but didn’t throw it quite yet, like she was hoping her victim would give up without a fight.   
  
Elo frowned, disappointed that she’d run across a ruffian. “Aww man, you just _had_ to be a bad guy, huh?” She sighed and took a ball off her own belt. (The villain narrowed her eyes at it; apparently she hadn’t noticed it before. What, did she think Elo was really just running around with _only_ an under-leveled Snivy?)   
  
“Fine,” the girl said, squaring her shoulders. “Bring it on! I’ll just take your Pokemon _after_ I beat you.”   
  
She wished she could say that it was dead-easy and she’d moved on after beating this stylish ruffian into the ground, but Elo actually had a fairly difficult time fighting the Rocket Grunt, enough so that she was left highly annoyed when the girl ran off and abandoned her Sandshrew, and she had rescue it because _obviously._   
  
“I just wanted to know where you got your hair done!” she called as the punk girl scampered off.   
  
At least she got a Sandshrew out of it, she supposed.   
  
She didn’t know where the heck they were coming from, all of a sudden, but in the next few weeks, Elo encountered several more of the ‘GO Rocket’ members, who all had a not only a similar _modus operandi_ (try to steal Pokemon, abandon one of their own when defeated, like that made any dang sense), but also a similar style. The sleek black uniforms looked pretty good, Elo had to admit, and the expertly-dyed pink hair was so eye-catching! Yet not a single one of them would take a spare moment to tell her where the heck they’d gotten any of it done.   
  
“Try to beat me if you want to know!” one had said when she’d asked, clearly assuming that she had no chance.  
  
Elo just rolled her eyes and said, “Yeah, _gladly!”_   
  
Of course when her Dragonite absolutely _trounced_ their Houndoom (they’d spent the previous week power-leveling), all she got for her efforts was a petulant, “My boss will hear about this!”   
  
She got the grunt’s shadowy Houndoom too, but honestly she would have preferred the hair-dying tips. She had enough trouble handling all of the other skittish Pokemon the grunt’s teammates had carelessly abandoned with her. Rehabilitating the poor things was going to be a nightmare.   
  
Somehow, the last thing she was expecting, the following week, was for the previous grunt to have actually kept to their promise-threat and tell their boss about their mortifying defeat. But to her great surprise, an honest-to-goodness hot-air balloon descended on her when she was taking Houndoom out for a walk.   
  
The balloon landed with a thud a few tens of yards across the way, luckily not squashing any of the other people or Pokemon playing in the park. (A few people startled in the background, and somebody’s Persian hissed angrily.) A person in a thick black jacket hopped out of the basket and stalked towards her.   
  
“You!” he called, and as he got closer Elo could see that he was scowling fiercely. “Are you the one who has been terrorizing my subordinates?”   
  
_‘Ah,’_ she thought, her eyes going a bit wide. So this was the boss. He wasn’t pink-haired like his junior members, but she could see immediately that he had _at least as good_ a sense of style. That outfit really worked for him, with the thick white gloves and boots and those glasses so wide they might better be called goggles. And that _hair!_   
  
“Uh… hi…” Elo said, grinning stupidly. Oh, this was a problem. He was _cute!_ And that scowl was not helping.   
  
He looked confused at her response, which was reasonable, as she’d completely ignored his question. “I _asked you,”_ he started, pausing a cautious fifteen feet away, “if you were the one who beat my underlings! If so, prepare to face my revenge!”   
  
Elo wasn’t remotely afraid, even though she knew (logically, somewhere in her brain) that this guy was probably a strong battler. He was just so… so nice to look at! His threats fell on ears too distracted by the cadence of his voice to care exactly what he was saying. Still, his expression said he might literally light her on fire with his gaze, so she tried to muster up some kind of answer.   
  
“I, um,” she said, swallowing as her heart ba-dumped in her chest and her whole face grew in a goofy smile. “Maybe.”   
  
If it was possible, his scowl deepened; he looked deeply bothered by her answer. “Either you _are_ the girl, or you’re simply wasting my time.”   
  
She was a little too star-struck to tell him that, actually, it was both.   
  
Furthermore, she was a little too star-struck to battle very well, and he beat her team to the ground.   
  
“Remember me next time you consider interfering with Team GO Rocket!” he sneered in a smooth growl, just before he disappeared in a puff of smoke (like a _ninja)._   
  
“Oh, I’ll remember you,” Elo replied faintly, still smiling like an idiot. Her battle-worn Pidgeot stared at her in disappointment and shook its head. Elo stroked its neck apologetically, and it nipped her ear in begrudging acceptance.   
  
She thought that might be the end of that, and that the Rocket boss’s slightly-androgynous face would simply haunt her fantasies for the rest of her life, but GO Rocket grunts kept popping up on her daily outings, and Elo continued to feel compelled to beat them. Hence, two weeks after the first encounter, the somewhat-mysterious object of her sudden affection appeared to her again.   
  
“It seems you’re an idiot as well as a nuisance!” he called as he approached. “Unless I wasn’t clear enough last time. Perhaps you need a reminder?”   
  
“Yes please,” Elo said with a bit of a breathy giggle, pleasantly surprised to see him. She was just the slightest bit less overwhelmed than she had been previously, so she had the presence of mind to say, “Wait, but can I ask you a few things first?”   
  
Again, he looked confused by her answer, and a little bit disgusted. _“Now_ you want to have a conversation? Last time I thought you had been struck dumb.”   
  
_‘By your gorgeous face,’_ she thought, but she refrained from being quite so open. “You just sort of surprised me, is all.”   
  
She couldn’t say for sure, as she’d only seen him the twice, but it seemed to her that he liked that answer, at least a little. He paused for a moment, like he wasn’t sure quite how to respond, and then said, so magnanimously, “You may ask me _one_ question.” He rested his hand on a Pokeball on his belt, lightly, like he was getting ready for a quick-draw at an old western shoot-out.   
  
Just one question? Elo groaned in disappointment. How was she supposed to pick one thing? She didn’t think an entire date would be enough time to learn everything she wanted to know about him! (Not unless it was at least three courses, anyway.) But _one question?_ That was just a tease!   
  
“Ahh, what should I say?” she muttered to Snivy, who rested on her shoulder.   
  
The little snake whipped its leafy tail around alluringly and batted its eyes, in a way Elo thought looked flirtatious. Flirt with him? Well, yeah, but… how?   
  
She looked back at the Rocket leader, who was still scowling, but with maybe a little less venom than before, and waiting _almost_ patiently. He wasn’t tapping his feet or anything, just seething with that barely-restrained ice-hot energy. Boy, he looked a sight in those tight black pants and the square-cut jacket (though she couldn’t imagine he was comfortable, all covered up like that when the weather was so fine). And as before, his hair was a perfectly stylish mess, long black-and-red bangs swooping over the side of his face and back, like some enticing exotic bird.   
  
But as he’d so far refused to turn away from her, ever the watchful predator, she couldn’t tell exactly _what_ was going on at the back of his head. Did he have a ponytail back there? Or was it some sort of carefully-tousled long faux-hawk? She was dying to know!   
  
So the question Elo found herself asking was, “Can you turn around for a sec?”   
  
The young man bristled, perhaps more like a porcupine than a bird. “Absolutely _not,”_ he said, and wasted no time throwing out his first Pokemon into the battlespace between them.   
  
“Aww....” Elo said, sighing and sadly sending out her Dragonite. It popped up, raring to go, until it noticed exactly who they were fighting, at which point it cast an accusing glance over its shoulder, as if to say ‘really mom? This guy again?’   
  
Needless to say, they lost, and the Rocket leader disappeared again, as quickly as he’d shown up, apparently satisfied that Elo had learned her lesson.   
  
Elo had learned _a_ lesson, but it wasn’t that she should stop fighting Rocket grunts. No, the lesson she learned was that she should fight _more_ Rocket grunts.   
  
The next day found her running around Pokestops downtown, hoping to find a few loitering pink-haired ruffians.   
  
“Hey!” she yelled, as she dashed up to one, who looked completely startled to have been caught off guard, as they were usually the ones accosting others. “Hey! If I beat you, you’ll tell your boss about it, right?!”   
  
Fear lit the young man’s eyes as Elo gripped a Pokeball meaningfully. “W-who? Arlo?”   
  
“Is that his name?” Elo asked breathlessly, and she could feel the hearts floating around her as the name sunk into her head. _Arlo._ It was so fitting! Elegant, yet brutal in its simplicity. “The gorgeous one? You know, with the hair?”   
  
The grunt didn’t seem quite as taken with his boss as Elo was, but he grimaced and said, “Uh, yeah.”   
  
Feeling triumphant, Elo backed up enough to give their Pokemon room to fight. “Great!” she said, grinning. “Then tell him you didn’t stand a chance against me!”   
  
Luckily, the grunt did _not,_ in fact, stand a chance against her. (Elo herself was brimming with just too much energy to lose; Dragonite was tired of the run-around and fought splendidly to have it all over with.)   
  
She fought four more grunts just that day, and several more the day after that, and she made sure to tell them all to inform their boss about it. Even so, it took him until the fourth day to visit her again, this time as she was spinning Pokestops at a little graveyard down the street from her house.   
  
“I’m starting to think you’re doing this on purpose,” he said as he approached her with a little less manic energy than before. He narrowed his eyes at her, obviously wondering if he’d misjudged her before. “Do you have some sort of plan to topple Team GO Rocket, or are you just a glutton for punishment?”   
  
“Maybe I just wanted to get you alone,” she said with a grin that walked the uneasy line between seductive and silly.   
  
His eyes widened. “Why on earth would you want that?”   
  
She shrugged. “Well you always run away so fast after we’re done fighting, I don’t get the chance to talk to you.”   
  
“That’s because I don’t talk to commoners,” Arlo said, with an added ‘hmph’ for emphasis.   
  
It was a little disingenuous of him to call her a commoner after she’d beaten more than fifteen of his underlings, in her opinion, but she didn’t fight it. “You’re talking to me now,” she said instead.   
  
He gave a classic ‘tch’. “Only because you continue to disrupt our operations.”   
  
And she would _continue_ to do so, too, which they both knew. There was really no way for Arlo to get out of conversing with her, but also no way for _Elo_ to make him put any feeling into it. Unless…   
  
“Fine. Then if I beat you, you have to talk to me! For at least three minutes!”   
  
He didn’t look like he loved the idea, but after a moment of consideration, Arlo nodded. “Fine.”   
  
Feeling bold, Elo added, “And if I beat you with one Pokemon, you have to go on a date with me!”   
  
Arlo was clearly taken aback for a moment, but he righted himself quickly, having caught on to the rhythm of their challenge. “Alright,” he said, finally giving her a smile. It was a beautiful, cocky one, and it made her heart all a-flutter. Clearly he thought she stood no chance.   
  
To be fair, she didn’t. She lost badly, just like the times before. (Not _horribly,_ just badly.) But she was less broken-up about it than before; at least this time she’d gotten him to engage with her a little bit.   
  
He seemed less antagonistic this time too. Instead of disappearing in a mysterious cloud of smoke, he stood and stared down at her for a moment, as she nursed her Dragonite back to health with a revive and a potion.   
  
“Good effort,” he said, only slightly mocking. He tilted his head and waited for a moment, and then added, “Out of pity, I’ll allow one question.”   
  
Elo gazed up at him in surprise, her mouth slightly ajar. “Really?!” she asked. “Wow. Ok, um. Gosh… Well…” She thought for a moment, eyes raking over him from head to toe, wondering what she most wanted to know. As her look lighted on his beautiful fringe, with its valorous streak of crimson, she smiled. “Ok, then… Who does your hair?”   
  
As he was still standing his requisite fifteen feet away, she couldn’t say for sure, but it looked like maybe Arlo was blushing just the tiniest bit, pleased. “I do it myself,” he said, and with a smirk he turned to saunter away from her, tossing his hair as he went.   
  
From the distance, she still couldn’t quite tell if it was a ponytail or a faux-hawk, but Elo felt her heart grow lighter anyway. So maybe she had lost, but this was progress! Next time she’d have him!   
  
(As long as her long-suffering Dragonite didn’t mutiny first.) 


End file.
